@ PhantomLord
Wow, the swiss army knife of shovels.

I won't say anything other than I was slightly disappointed with the ending, but otherwise not too bad. Not RSR level though.
Thanks for the link, although you might want to knock the radio-room link off the front of it because at the moment it's sending to Subsim front page, I managed to twig the link you meant to post though :salute: I will have a read through of that in a bit. :yeah:

Oh...and...DAMN I WANT one of those shovels NOW!! :rock:

Been wanting to get some new books for a while, I may have to try to catch up with Jack Ryan :hmmm:

You might want to check out The Third World War by General Sir John Hackett as well if you haven't already. Good reading, a bit heavy in some places but good.


I've thought of another use for that shovel. Cooking Pan. I've seen Russian soldiers use their shovels in that way before, so it shouldn't be too difficult to do the same thing. Heck, steam train drivers in the UK cooked (and still cook) with their coal shovels, so if they can, the Chinese sure can too! :yep:

Personally, i think we'll eventually be at war with Iran, or china, or both at some point in the future. China is becoming a superpower, and it's going to flex its muscle at some point.

China is also, from what i can tell, the industralized nation that the US was during WW2. If we were in an open war with them, they'd probably outproduce us both in warm bodies, and war material from all the manufactering capability that used to be here, but is now there. Yeah we'll be strong in our conviction that because were America we'll endure and prevail, but the thing is America was bought, sold and traded for years ago, and China owns a good portion of it.

Not challenging what you say but I hope the US will continue to prevail.

How many American lives is Taiwan worth?

Platypus - its not really a question of how many "American" lives is Taiwan worth.....

What matters is we are obligated under treaty to protect and defend Taiwan.

The question should thus be - How many lives are worth America honoring its treaty obligations......

Which treaty is this?

The Mutual Defense Treaty was ended by the United States in 1980
http://www.taiwandocuments.org/mutual01.htm

The Taiwan Relations Act is not a treaty but a federal law. The wording of the act is an example of the art of obfuscation and ambiguity. Nowhere in the act, nor in the Six Assurances, does it legally obligate that the United States will engage the PRC in military action if the PRC invades Taiwan.

The TRA is a delicate balancing act concerning our relationships with both sides. It leaves just enough ambiguity not to get the Chinese spun up too much, but just enough clarity to keep the Taiwanese spun-down.

I suppose I should not resist making a pun about being caught between a ROC and a hard place. :D

The TRA does obligate the US to sell defensive arms to Taiwan.

Few Presidents, Republican or Democratic, seem eager to back themselves into a most unpleasant corner on this issue.

This article gives a pretty good summation of the issue:
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/20...nse_huang.aspx

All the TRA does is give the President the option of taking military action, but since he already has that power, that portion of the TRA is moot as it, in no way, legally obligates the President to take military action.

Is Taiwan, really any of our business to begin with? :O:

Well considering that in my opinion there is only one justification for going to war and that is that winning the war furthers a national policy, agenda, or goal, this is a very cogent question. :yep:

Safe assumption that many of the chips in your computer were manufactured in Taiwan. A lot of computer hardware is manufactured in Taiwan (the basic stuffs like microchips, transistors, semiconductors, while the cards and boards are assembled in Singapore or Mexico etc), that's why Taiwan called the Silicon Island. :salute:

The Interwebs... made in Taiwan :03:

I think you have been mislead, my friend. China isn't anywhere near being the world's leading economic power. By most measures it's a distant third, with economic output measuring roughly half of what the EU and the US produce.

China is indeed a developing superpower, but her time is not yet. As of now, she depends far to heavily on Western economies. Barring some radical political change, it will be at least two more decades before China picks herself up by her bootstraps and becomes a truly modern nation. If she ever reaches that point, there will be no reason to fear her. Affluent nations have no reason to wage irrational wars.


How many Taiwanese lives is China worth? If we don't protect them, the answer is all of them. The Chinese Communist party will steal everything the Taiwanese have worked so hard to achieve over the past half-century. I don't particularly care about Taiwan because I'm a practical person who doesn't believe that the US has any business or real ability to enforce its will upon the world other than being a haven for the poor and disenfranchised, but can you accept responsibility for the fate of Taiwan? Will you vote to protect Taiwan? Will you fight for her? Will you do nothing to save all those people?

I don't know. Were the Jews enduring the Holocaust any of our business to begin with? Were the Koreans or the Vietnamese or the Somalians or Kuwaitis or the Iraqis or the Kurds or the Bosnians any of our business to begin with?

It all boils down to whether or not you think the wealthiest nation in the world has any kind of moral obligation to the rest of the world. I think it doesn't because I already know that there is nothing the US can do to rectify the rest of the world's problems. No amount of money will fix a genocide, and no amount of military intervention will correct religious hatred. It doesn't work like that. The only thing that will make people co-exist in relative peace is wealth brought about by capitalism and the resultant non-conflct over resources of any kind. You can choose to believe that or not while the wealthiest nations in the world spend their time fighting on behalf of other nations for silly political reasons.

If you worry about chips from Taiwan, then for the same reason you also have to worry about general electronics parts from Foxcon, located inside the special economy zone of Shenyang, China. you'll meet them as often in your computers and electronics, as you meet those Taiwanese chips - if not more often.

That would put the Foxconn factories even more at risk. The Chinese would not bomb their own factories or foreign factories they can simply seize, own and use, but Taiwan they would flood with missiles and destroy industrial high value assets, if they cannot overrun and seize the island quite qickly. I mean it is hard to image that the importance of Foxconn for Western high tech escapes their attention.

Well in the article they said they may move them to India and Vietnam, so I don't think they would be at risk. India has the most powerful military in South Asia, not to mention the bomb so I don't think China would be able to conduct a military action against Foxconn's factories there without starting WWIII, (India and the US against China? How much would they charge on Pay Per View for that fight?). Vietnam perhaps they could bomb them and not fear much retaliation, attacks against Chinese's held islands in the Spratly's would be a possible counter strike for Vietnam or sub attacks against PRC shipping with their North Korean provided Yugo type subs or those new Kilos they are buying. Seizing Foxconn factories in Vietnam would be fair more difficult, remember the last time China sent troops in to Vietnam? It was a debacle.

A, I missed the part on Vietnam and India. The translation reached me after waiting over one minute, and then in mutilated form only and with many §$% and ?#! passages. I believed they would move to Taiwan.

Ypou mean the third Vietnam war when chinese intervention stopped the march of the vietnamese? The losses were high on both sides, but Vietnam took a nasty beating, being stopped and pushed back to their own land. They went a long way since then, milutarily. Today, they probably would decide a war with Vietnam much more decisively.

It is a story that tells everybody in the West that the Chinese do not shy away from conflict even if that means losses much higher than western nation's people would tolerate.

However, chinese history also shows that china does not favour military aggression for expansion beyond its borders. They use Ferengi diplomacy, not Klingon confrontation. Taiwan they set their eyes on not to conquer something foreign, but because they live by the honest belief that it legitimately is part of One-China.

>>The Interwebs... made in Taiwan

If it wasn't Taiwan, it would be in india, or somewhere else. Either way, the worlds corporations would find some country with cheap labor to manufacture their goods in.

>>It all boils down to whether or not you think the wealthiest nation in the world has any kind of moral obligation to the rest of the world.

Hell no! What i want to know is where is it written we have to involve ourselves in other peoples problems? Use whatever euphism you want, but who died and left us to be the worlds F**king policeman? Or did we just appoint ourselves? Or is there some law written somewhere that we must? We pour money and people into other countries, and all too often they piss down our backs, spit in our face. or take pot shots at us. Screw that, we need to look out for our own people for a change. If the problem is not in our country, it is not our problem. You know that old joke about "If patton were president"? That pretty much sums up my belief in this matter.